True Blood and queerness (spoilers through ep 2.09)
We finally watched last weekend's True Blood... and let me just say, I will watch Alexander Skarsgard's queer manpain Any Day.
A few comments about queer coding in this show... I'm sticking with it, but am starting to chafe at how many heterosexual romance plots we've seen portrayed as metaphors for queer romance narratives. Take Hoyt/Jessica--I find their subplot very charming! But her story in particular is rife with queer narratives. We saw her being rejected by her family, in religious terms that closely echo those leveled against gays. We saw her going through rebellious phases while seeking mentorship from her fangbanger (ie., queer) role model Sookie and her Maker (ie., the older man who initiates her into the life, more on this later) Bill. And now the flush of first love, of finding acceptance with Hoyt. Of meeting his mother, who is bitter and mean to her because she's corrupting her only son. Hoyt's mother cruelly ennumerates the things Hoyt is 'giving up' for this relationship--sunlight, being with a girl of good family, and most importantly, babies. In broader terms, the way the conservative religious institutions are nasty about vampires, their catchy little phrases ("God Hates Fangs on the church sign in the credits, for instance), not to mention the casual bigotry against vampires and revulsion at the idea of vampire/human relationships are clearly coded to rely on the social position of gays and lesbians in our society. I think Jessica's story is even more overtly appropriative of the queer narrative than Sookie/Bill is and was last season.
So, is this appropriation of queer narratives? Absolutely. And I think the replacement of queer people with man-eating monsters in these narratives should give us all pause, and if it weren't for Lafayette's character, the implications of this replacement would have been enough for me to stop watching after the first few episodes.
I can't help but bring to mind the Star Trek: TNG episode "The Outcast", which was their "gay issue" episode, clearly giving us a queer oppression storyline, but without any actual gay people (in this alien society, identifying as a gender-male or female-was illegal and got 'treated' by shock therapy. the covert romance is a heterosexual one between a female-identified alien and Riker). It's fairly obvious that TNG and True Blood both want to be sympathetic to LGBT people's narratives, but think it's going to be more palatable to a mainstream audience when adjusted to be heterosexual instead of homosexual. I think I see the reasoning there, but it's weak, and I think in the case of TNG for sure it was not particularly helpful.
I would say the same for True Blood if it weren't for Lafayette's character (!!), who I had some issues with in the first season but continue to like more and more. He's black, he's unabashedly gay and flamboyantly-garbed, but he never falls into being a stereotype (though he does occasionally use stereotypes to his own ends, which is kind of awesome). I also think that in recent episodes in particular, he's the character the show asks the audience to identify with. See the scene where he confronts Eggs and Tara for her bruises in Merlott's, and the crowd of customers laugh at him. His retort is to tell them to mind their own business and to call them a bunch of rednecks. The way that scene plays out, he comes out as seeming the most humane and sane character--his justified fear and anger for Tara's bruises gives us an emotional connection to him, and the onlookers are nothing more than callous assholes in response. I like what they've been doing with Lafayette--his PTSD moment in an earlier ep with Terry in the kitchen is one of the most unexpected and memorable scenes in the show so far. They're taking him to emotional places that they've shied away from with the main cast, and I'm hoping they continue that trend.
And then there's Eric. Eric... is the little black dress of this show. We've seen scenes in which his queerness is suggested by inference (the scene in an early ep this season when a shopgirl mistakes Eric and Bill for a gay couple) and by analogy: first, if drinking his blood makes it so Eric can feel her emotions and gives her erotic fixations, then the same should be true of Lafayette, who drank the "1000 year old healing elixir that is [Eric's] blood", and second, we've seen Bill and his Maker get up to all sorts of sexual and longterm intense romance themes... and Eric's Maker is Godric. We've also seen Godric elicit actual emotions from Eric, who's been an unbelievably cool customer up until these scenes. I know this sounds like a lot of fangirl speculation, and maybe it is, but I think the show kind of has to mean it, because of how Godric's death goes down. Weeping! Clinging! This was the episode where the subtext wails and weeps tears of blood and falls to its knees with love for the text. And then the text tells the subtext "there are centuries of faith and love between us." Seriously. If you want to see it, you can find it on youtube here.
Of course, we only got to have Godric for a couple of episodes... and if the subtext is really as gay as all that, it also comes laden with the knowledge that both characters are evil and have done evil things, and then one commits suicide. So... it's definitely not yet at a place where I'm happy about the depictions. Like, if Lafayette and Sookie have both drunk Eric's blood, then why didn't we see a dream sequence between Lafayette and Eric? In fact, why is the only overt gay sex we've seen all show one of prostitution (Lafayette sucking off Eddie the Vampire in exchange for his blood--a powerful drug). So far Eddie is the only character we've seen who's talked about being both gay and a vampire... and convincingly. Of course, he's dead, too. So.
I'm certainly enjoying it on a purely superficial level, and I'm coming to really like several of the characters, enough so that there are at least 4 on my favorites list. I'm not so head over heels for it that I can't see its flaws, though, too, though I will say it has surprised me with its quality.
OSCON Keynote on Women in Open Source
I want to make sure I link to Skud's OSCON keynote speech about women in open source culture. It's eye-opening, and is one of the reasons I'm working on changing my perspective on whether or not *I* can learn basic programming and other tech skills.
She also highlights why the OTW and Dreamwidth are great projects and are important as being the only major open source projects with a majority female developer demographic--not just the content, but the development is very much grounded in the community, and women are connecting and skillsharing in really important ways.
Glee
I accidentally watched Glee last night, and yes, I do in fact regret it.
I am SO over the manipulative women in this show! I count FIVE in this episode alone! That's almost all the women with speaking parts! We still have the Hysterical Pregnancy Wife, also her conniving pregnancy coach/doula, we have Rachel threatening to quit if she doesn't get the lead (again), we've got Sue the cheerleading coach who uses images of the principal wearing compression hose (nevermind that it's for an airline commercial and not a sexual context at all) to blackmail him, and we have the pregnant Celibacy Club cheerleader, who tells her nice boyfriend it's his (even though they've never had sex) because he'd be a better father than his best friend, the ACTUAL father. UUUUUUUUUGH. These are horrible portrayals of all kinds of women--popular girls, competitive women, and hysterical wives. The redeeming moments were barely that, though I'll admit to liking Kurt's coming out scene and, well, pretty much all of his and Kim's scenes ever. That wasn't enough to make up for how disgusted I felt by the end of it. Also, not NEARLY enough Mercedes.
STILL not watching you, show.
I also read Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins, and have some things to say about it. I enjoyed it but have some serious reservations about how it doesn't incorporate gender or (especially) race or class into its analysis, and it definitely felt in a lot of places like a how-to-market-to-the-new-online-audiences-for-giant-corporations, which...um. I also think he wasn't thorough in his exploration of examples, and I felt like the examples he uses were chosen because they highlight his agenda, and he doesn't explore them on their own terms. This was most obvious to me with how he used Harry Potter fanfiction to highlight how children are learning new media literacy skills through play... but there's a lot more to fannish culture than just kids getting educated, and I think his analysis fell down right there.
But! Having read this book gave me great background for two recent things I've read and recommend to you now, including several essays in Cinema Journal devoted to vidding and fandom. It's not yet available online, but check your local academic library. Kristina Busse's introduction is fantastic. There are great articles in there about particular vids (Francesca Coppa takes on A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness and Alexis Lothian discusses
Alien Nation
I watched Alien Nation a couple of days ago (the one with James Caan and Mandy Patinkin from 1988--I've never seen any of the show or movies before). I was surprised at how it was actually pretty good, despite being cheesy with gaping plot holes.
What I appreciated best were the lost little moments that highlight a racist society--the erasure of minority names, replacing them with 'human' ones that are mocking (Francisco's first name is "Sam"--he tells Sykes his given Newcomer name but Sykes immediately dubs him "George", again, "human" privilege in what is and isn't acceptable naming).
I liked the internal conflict between members of the Newcomer race, conflict that drives the plot and that asks serious questions about assimilation (which, in the end, the film portrays as positive), traitorousness, opportunism. The scene where they get drunk together (and how much do I love the sour milk business! These aliens are, like, alien!), and Sykes can't explain why a joke is funny, because humor is so contextually rooted and the Newcomer doesn't have the cultural frame of reference to participate. I loved the extreme deliberation of Francisco, I loved how he tried to act as a bridge and almost fell in the water (metaphorically, but also almost literally!) when he tried to straddle the divide between allegiance to his species and allegiance to safety and justice.
It is by no means a perfect film, and in a lot of ways it's seriously dated and could have benefited by a lot less of James Caan playing James Caan. There were some problematic issues about homosexuality, but this film was not sophisticated enough to do more than take a few potshots. But I'd be interested in the show and will probably give it a try.
Technofear
I'm behind on blogging over here, for that I'm sorry.
Thanks to my friend J., I'm actually learning a few skills I didn't have before. I've drifted between several blog sites, picking up some html as necessary here and there. However, I've never known how to do more than the really easy stuff, like changing my theme to a predetermined one I found off the internet, posting in the Rich Text Editor, etc. But it's time I got a little more computer savvy, so J. helpfully gave me webspace and taught me how to install a WordPress blog from scratch, as well as a wiki. I'm not sure what I'll use the wiki for, yet, but I'll think of something!
It's a tiny step, but it feels really huge to me, to be shown the site code, to be told what some of it means and how to play with it. I spent a couple of frustrating hours playing with the colors and fonts on this WP theme stylesheet, trying to identify on my own which piece of code will effect which change. I'm not good at it, and my first impulse when I'm not good at something is to put off doing it... and I did not want to post before I had my page looking at least decent. At this point, it's time to get to blogging here as well, style bedamned.
I realized that I have a strange mix of technofear and technojoy (hat tip to Eddie Izzard). My parents are very suspicious about anything to do with computers, and they never encouraged me to interact much with them. When I got to high school, I made friends with a bunch of geeky boys who were really into computers, and who knew a lot more than me about them because they had had encouragement and access to the tech and a small geekish community to nurture them. I was way behind them on knowing stuff, and they prided themselves on understanding the technology, and so they ended up doing things for me and being somewhat patronising (unintentionally, but still). So I learned to just cultivate friendships with geeky people so they can do my tech stuff and fixing of my computer and things *for* me. I internalized this idea that I Am Bad At Technology, which isn't necessarily true. And these are skills I want and need to know to become a good librarian, yannow? Useful professionally AND personally.
So, this year I am resolved to take opportunities to become tech-knowledgeable. I'm done with letting the fact that I don't know something keep me from learning it. Concretely, this means starting with learning to install and use a wiki and wordpress, and learning more html with the goal of giving up the Rich Text Editor. Also, learning how to record and edit podcasts, and learning how to vid (probably going to have to start in imovie even though I covet Final Cut). Thanks to J. for handholding me through my first wiki editing experience (which ended with, "oh wait, there's an 'edit' tab on the frontpage... *facepalm*). She is patient and enthusiastic and has been the only person to ever convince me that really, yes, I can actually learn these things. For real. That means a lot to me already.